Roger remembered that a few yards away there was a German restaurant, where some of his friends used to play dominoes over steins of lager. He entered the restaurant, hoping to meet some one; hoping, too, that the kindly foreign feeling which made the place restful and delightful might help him to forget his sorrow and distaste for life. He ordered coffee and cognac, and sat there, sorrowfully smoking, scanning those who entered, but seeing no friend among them.
As he smoked the memories of the evening assailed him. He saw his work hooted from the stage, and John passing from his life, and the sot's bloated mouth babbling filth at him. His nerves were all shaken to pieces by the emotional strain of the past fortnight. He was in a child's mood; the mood of the homesick boy at school. He was as dangerously near hysteria as the drunkard. He longed to be over in Ireland, in the house of that beautiful woman whom he loved, to be in the presence of calm and tenderness and noble thought, away from all these horrors and desolations. The thought of Ottalie Fawcett calmed him; for he could not think of that beautiful woman and of himself at the same time. Memories of her gave his mind a sweet, melancholy food. One memory especially, of the beautiful lady, in her beautiful, early Victorian dress, with great hat, grey gauntlets, and old pearl earrings, bending over a mass of white roses in the garden, recurred again and again. To think of her intently, and to see her very clearly in a mind acutely excited, was like communion with her. Her image was so sharply outlined in his heart that he felt an exultation, as though their hearts were flowing into each other. One tingling thought of her was like her heart against his. It made him sure that she was thinking of him at that instant, perhaps with tenderness. He tried to imagine her thoughts of him. He tried to imagine himself her, looking out under that great hat, through those lively eyes, a beautiful, charming woman, exquisite, guarded, and infinitely swift of tact. It ended with a passionate longing to get away to Ireland to see her, cost what it might. His heart turned to her; he would go to her. He could not live without love.
The play had ended before ten o'clock. It was now half-past eleven. Roger paid his bill, and turned into Shaftesbury Avenue, thinking that within thirty-six hours he would be set free. This dusty tumult would be roaring to other ears. He would be by the waters of Moyle, among magical glens, knocking at his love's door, walking with her, hearing her voice, sitting with her over the turf fire, in that old house on the hills, looking over towards Ailsa. That would be life enough. It would give him strength to begin again after his failure and the loss of his friend. His mind was full of her. He turned, as he had so often turned, late at night, to look at the windows of the little upper flat which his love shared with her friend Agatha Carew-Ker. They were seldom in town to use the flat. They came there for flying visits generally in the spring and winter, when passing through London to the Continent. It was a tiny flat of four living-rooms, high up, on the south side of Shaftesbury Avenue; a strange place for two ladies to have chosen, but it was near the theatres and shops. As Roger walked towards it he recalled the last time he had been there, seven months before. He had had tea alone with Ottalie, one misty October evening. For nearly half an hour they were alone in the flat, sitting together by the fire in the dusk, talking intimately, even tenderly; for there was something magical in the twilight, and the companionship was too close, during that rare half-hour, for either to light the lamp. He had known Ottalie since childhood; but never before like this. Her tenderness and charm and grave beauty had never been so near to him. Two minutes more in that dusk would have brought him to her side. He would have taken her hands in his. He would have asked her if life could go back again, after such communion, to the old frank comradeship. Then Agatha came in, with her hardness and bustle and suspicion. The spell had been broken. Agatha rated them for sitting in the dark. When he lighted the lamp, he was conscious of Agatha's sharp critical eye upon him, and of a certain reproachful jealousy in her tone towards Ottalie. There were little hard glances from one face to the other; and then some ill-concealed feminine manoeuvring to make it impossible for him to stay longer. He stayed until Agatha became pointed. That was the last time he had seen Ottalie. He had heard from her from time to time. He had sent her his last novel and his book of tales. She had sent him a silver match-box as a Christmas present. Agatha, in a postscript, had conveyed her "love" to him.
He paused on the north side of the avenue to look at the flat windows high up on the opposite side. He was startled to see a light in Ottalie's bedroom, a long gleam of light where the curtains parted, a gleam dimmed momentarily by some one passing. For five seconds he saw the light, then it was blown out. Some one was in the flat, possibly Ottalie herself. He might, perhaps, see her early the next morning. She might be there, just across the road. She might have been within three hundred yards of him for this last miserable hour; but it was strange that she had not written to tell him that she was coming to town. It could hardly be Ottalie. It might be Agatha, or some friend to whom they had lent the flat for the season. He was eager now for the next day to dawn, so that he might find out. He was utterly weary. He hailed a cab and drove to his rooms in Westminster. The cabman, thinking him an easy subject, demanded more than the excess fare given to him. Roger told him that he would get no more, and entered the house. The cabman, becoming abusive, climbed down and battered at the knocker, till the approach of a policeman warned him that any further attempts might lead to a summons. He drove away growling.
Roger lived in chambers in one of the old houses of Westminster. He rented a little panelled sitting-room, a bedroom, also panelled, rather larger, and a third room so tiny that a clothes-press and a bath almost filled it. He lit his lamp to see what letters had come for him. There were five or six, none of them from Ottalie. A telegram lay on the table. It was from an evening paper asking for the favour of an interview early the next morning. The row at the theatre was bearing fruit. He opened his letters; but, seeing that they were not amusing, he did not read them. He went into his bedroom to undress. On the mantelpiece was a rehearsal call card, which had given him a thrill of pleasure a fortnight before. Now it seemed to grin at him with a devilish inanimate malice. An etched portrait of O'Neill looked down mournfully from the wall. A photograph of Ottalie on the dressing-table was the last thing noticed by him as he blew out the lamp.
In the next house a member of Parliament lived. His wife was musical, in a hard, accomplished way. She sang cleverly, though her voice was not good. She sang as her excellent masters had taught her to sing. She had profited by their teaching to the limits of her nature. In moments of emotion, when she recognised her shortcomings, she quoted to herself a line from Abt Vogler, "On the earth a broken arc, in the heaven a perfect round." She was an irregular, eccentric lady, fond of late hours. This night some wandering devil caused her to begin to play at midnight, when Roger, utterly exhausted by the strain of the evening, was falling to a merciful sleep. A few bars was enough to waken Roger. The wall between them was not thick enough to dull the noise. The few melancholy bars gathered volume. She began to sing with hard, metallic, callousness, with disillusion in each note. Poor lady, the moment was beautiful to her. She could not know that she, in her moment of delight, was an instrument of the malevolent stars next door. Roger sat up in bed with a few impatient words. He knew the lady's song; he had heard Ottalie sing it. Hearing this other lady sing it was instructive. It confirmed him in a theory held by him, that refinement was a quality of the entire personality; that delicacy of feeling, beauty of nature, niceness of tact, were shown in the least movement, in the raising of a hand, in the head's carriage, in the least sound of the voice. Ottalie sang with all the beauty of her character, giving to each note an indescribable rightness of value, verbal as well as musical, conveying to her hearers a sense of her distinction of soul, a sense of the noble living of dead generations of Fawcetts; a sense of style and race and personal exquisiteness. This lady sang as though she were out in a hockey field, charging the ball healthily, in short skirts, among many gay young sprigs from the barracks. She sang like the daughter of a nouveau riche. Her song was a brief liaison between Leipzig and a vulgar constitution.
Two minutes of her song put all thought of sleep from Roger's mind. He lit his lamp and searched for some cigarettes. Something prompted him to take down Wentworth's Tragedy of Poppaea. He would read it over until the lady's muscles tired. He lit a cigarette. Propping himself up with pillows he began to read, admiring the precise firmness of the rhythms, and that quality in the style which was all fragrance and glimmer, a fine bloom of beauty, never too much, which marked the artist. The choruses moved him by their inherent music. They were musical because the man's mind, though sternly muscular and manly, was full of melody. They were unlike most modern verse, which is reckoned musical when it shows some mechanical compliance with a pattern of music already in the popular ear. Roger, as a writer not yet formed, was curious in all things which showed personal distinction and striving. This exquisite verse, this power of fine, precise intellectual conception, was reward enough, he thought, for the misery which this poet had suffered from his fellows. Roger wondered how many ladies like the singer on the other side of the wall had asked poor Wentworth to their "At Homes" for any but a vulgar reason. He remembered how Wentworth, a strict moralist soured by a life of suffering, had spoken to one lady. "You will buy my books and lay them on your tables. You will ask me to dinner to amuse yourself with my talk. You have won a reputation for wit by repeating my epigrams. And for which of my ideas do you care two straws, for which would you sacrifice one least vanity, for which would you outrage one convention? I will come to your 'At Home.'"
The cigarette was smoked out. The lady, having finished some four songs, now toyed with a little Grieg, a little Bach, a little Schumann, like a delicate butterfly flying by the finest clockwork. Roger, who was now in no mood for sleep, found the music of some value as an accompaniment to Poppaea. It was like the light and excitement of a theatre, added to the emotion of the poetry. He read through to the end of the second act, when his eyes began to trouble him. Then he rose, hurriedly dressed, wrapped himself in a Chinese robe, embroidered with green silk dragons, and passed through his sitting-room window on to the balcony above the street. It was a narrow, old-fashioned balcony, big enough for three people, if the people were fond of each other. Structurally it was a part of the balcony of the member's house, but an old straw trellis-work divided the two tenancies at the party wall. Roger placed a deck-chair with its back against the trellis, which shut off the member's balcony from his. He was sheltered from above by a green verandah canopy, and from the street by another trellis about five feet high. He would not sleep now, until four; he knew his symptoms of old. He could not read. It was useless to lie tossing in bed. He sat in the deck-chair mournfully munching salted almonds. He was in a state of unnatural nervous excitement. The music came through the house delicately to him, softened by two walls, one of them honestly built in the late seventeenth century. He thought that John O'Neill would be distant music to him henceforth. Perhaps the dead look on the living souls as notes in a music, and play upon them, making harmony or discord, according to the power of their wills and the quality of their nature. He could imagine John, who had stricken so many living souls to music, playing on in death, not hampered by the indifference of any one note, but playing upon it masterly, rousing it to music, by striking some kindred note, reaching it through another, as perhaps our dead friends can. But life would be terrible without John. He remembered how Lamb walked about muttering "Coleridge is dead." A great spirit never expresses herself perfectly. She needs many lesser spirits to catch those glittering crumbs and fiery-flung manna seeds. When the bread passes, the disciples serve scraps and preach bakery.
He finished his salted almonds regretfully, remembering that he was out of olives. He lighted another cigarette, and lay there smoking, trying to get calm. It was very still but for the music; for Davenant Street was as quiet as Dean's Yard. The windows were all blank and dark; people were sleeping. Big Ben's noble tone told the quarters. A policeman went past softly, feeling at the doors. Something went wrong in the street lamp a few yards from Roger's perch. It fluttered as though some great moth were struggling in the flame. It died down to a few flagging points of light, leaving the dark street even darker. Big Ben, lifting a solemn sweet voice, tolled two, with noble melancholy, resigned to death, but hungry for the beauty of life, like the spirit of Raleigh speaking. Ottalie was asleep now, the grey eyes shut, the sweet face lying trustful. John was with the pale young Spaniard, doing what? in the room high aloft there, over Queen Square. London was about to take its hour of quiet. Only the poets, the scholars, and the idlers were awake now. In a little while the May dawn would begin. Even now it was tingeing the cherry blossom in Aleppo. The roses of Sarvistan were spilling in the heat. The blades of green corn by Troy gleamed above the river as the wind shook them. Tenedos rose up black, watching the channel, now showing steel.
Roger lighted another cigarette from the embers of the last. It was too quiet to strike a match. The stillness gave him an emotional pleasure. It gave him a sense of power, as though he were the only living spirit in the midst of all this death. He was sorry when the music stopped, for it had made the stillness more impressive. If his thoughts had not been calmed by it, they had at least been made more beautiful, chaotic as they were. The bitterness of the night worked less bitingly. He was conscious of an exaltation of the mind. Up there in the quiet, his devotion to John, his passion for Ottalie, and his love of all high and noble art, seemed co-ordinated in a grand scheme in which he was both god and man. Standing up, he looked over the trellis into the street, deeply moved. He was here to perfect that magnificent work of art,—himself. John, who had pointed the way, was gone now. Ottalie, who had inspired him, was waiting with her crown; or perhaps only showing it to lure him, for Nature, prodigal of dust and weed, gives true beauty sparingly. It was for him to follow that lure and to gather strength to seize it. The world was a little dust under his feet. In his soul was a little green seed bursting. It would grow up out of all the grime and muck of modern life, among all the flying grit of the air, into a stately tree, which would shelter the world with beauty and peace. He would be a supreme soul. He would dominate this rabble which hooted him.